Readiness Criteria

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Written By:David Rasch, iContact Chief Architect

How do you know when you’re ready to do work? How much design is un-agile?

Agile teams tend to make the mistake of doing almost no up-front design before plowing into the work at hand. Being agile doesn’t meant the work should be a complete mystery when you’re being asked to estimate and deliver it. Here at iContact, we’re rolling out a checklist that helps us determine when we’re ready to move forward from an idea to an Epic and when a Story is ready to go into a sprint.

Epic Readiness – know what we need to build so we can design

Business Requirements

Technical Requirements

Documentation

Story Readiness – know how we’ll build it so we can estimate

Design

Stories

Documentation

We’ve developed some checklists to help us get to this level of readiness:

Business Requirements Checklist

Do I know who the stakeholders are and what they want?

Do I know how we plan to roll this out to customers?

Do I understand feature-wise priority?

Technical Requirements Checklist

Will this affect areas of the software known to be more risky?

Do I have a high level understanding of environment/infrastructure/architecture impact?

What type of testing is needed? Load testing?

Design Checklist

Do I have a design documented?

Have I read it?

Have we solicited feedback from stakeholders? Are there collaboration points?

Do we have a diagram?

Do we understand the interfaces and the data passed between components?

Will there be additional data to store? Where? How will it be used?

Does our design manage risk?

Are there standards we can apply?

Is the design iterative? Can it be built in stages?

These tools are helping our teams plan backward from their grooming sessions to determine what level of technical vetting is necessary.

Article Info

Sep 30, 2010Written by David Rasch, who has written 9 articles for the iContact Blog.